Tag: Paul Farrell

Pope Francis leading the new American (Socialist) Revolution

Sometimes I wonder about this Farrell dude. I think he has gone off his rocker. He blathers on about socialism, Marx, Lenin, Mao and Castro as if socialism has ever worked. Socialism/Communism is what Hitler, Stalin and Mao used to justify the murders of millions. The pope during WWII got along with Mussolini and Hitler just fine. He didn’t resist or call for their defeat. There is not one example in the history of mankind where socialism has worked. Redistribution of wealth by those in control of the socialist agenda ends up being a fraud. The poor get poorer and the elite live like kings. There will be civil war, but the pope’s socialist dream will not be the result.
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Reuters
Pope Francis rides on a popemobile on a road leading from El Alto to La Paz, on the outskirts of La Paz, Bolivia.

Yes, Pope Francis is encouraging civil disobedience, leading a rebellion. Listen closely, Francis knows he’s inciting political rebellion, an uprising of the masses against the world’s superrich capitalists. And yet, right-wing conservatives remain in denial, tuning out the pope’s message, hoping he’ll just go away like the “Occupy Wall Street” movement did.

Never. America’s narcissistic addiction to presidential politics is dumbing down our collective brain. Warning: Forget Bernie vs. Hillary. Forget the circus-clown-car distractions created by Trump vs. the GOP’s Fab 15. Pope Francis is only real political leader that matters this year. Forget the rest. Here’s why:

Pope Francis is not just leading a “Second American Revolution,” he is rallying people across the Earth, middle class as well as poor, inciting billions to rise up in a global economic revolution, one that could suddenly sweep the planet, like the 1789 French storming the Bastille.

Unfortunately, conservative capitalists — Big Oil, Koch billionaires, our GOP Congress and all fossil-fuel climate-science deniers — are blind to the fact their ideology is on the wrong side of history, that by fighting a no-win battle they are committing suicide, self-destructing their own ideology.

The fact is: The era of capitalism is rapidly dying, a victim of its own success, sabotaged by greed and a loss of a moral code. In 1776 Adam Smith’s capitalism became America’s core economic principle. We enshrined his ideal of capitalism in our constitutional freedoms. We prospered. America became the greatest economic superpower in world history.

Continue reading “Pope Francis leading the new American (Socialist) Revolution”

DOES AMERICA HATE ITSELF?

I think Paul Farrell is losing his marbles. His articles bounce from we are in the greatest bull market of all-time to the end is near on a week to week basis. His article below does make some valid observations, but his vitriolic hatred for all Republicans and his unabashed support of Obama and his disastrous administration completely diminishes the credibility and impartiality of his analysis.

I do believe the majority of Americans are narcissistic, selfish, willfully ignorant, self loathing, materialistic, myopic, and angry. I also believe the bread, bombs and circuses provided by the ruling class, along with massive doses of propaganda and misinformation provided by the government controlled corporate media, have contributed greatly to the decline and degradation of this once great country.

The anger, hate, and vitriol engulfing our society are just symptoms of an empire in decline. Therapy won’t solve our problems. The choices we’ve made as a nation over the last 100 years have sealed our fate. The final phase will not be pretty.

Via Marketwatch

300 million self-hating Americans need a new Dr. Freud

Commentary: We need therapy for our self-destructive secrets

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Our deep, dark, self-destructive secret, America’s consumed with self-hatred

Yes, America has a deep, dark self-destructive secret: We hate ourselves. We hate America. Yes, Americans are consumed with self-hatred. Can’t face our demons. In denial, destroying our great nation.

Basic psychology: A dangerous virus infects America’s collective unconscious. We project our self-hatred on our enemies, the world “out there,” blaming leaders, bosses, neighbors, family. American souls are in so much pain, we attack everyone, anyone, those closest.


Library of Congress

Sigmund Freud

Yes, basic psychology. Freud, Jung warned us. Self-haters must blame. Can’t stand the darkness festering within. Project on “them,” blaming others, anyone. Self-haters carry a deep secret the therapist seeks, to help free them from their self-destructive pain.

The big problem is, this virus is spreading fast. Millions of self-hating Americans collect and dump their secrets in our one big collective unconscious. Hidden deepest: Our fear America has “peaked.” America is declining. To 1% GDP. Wars will accelerate. Do-nothing politics. Widening inequality. All hiding under the disappearing myth of the American Dream, a future where if you just work hard, tomorrow will be better than today, for our children, ourselves, everyone in this great nation. Gone. An illusion.

Yes, deep within our souls is America’s new collective reality. No longer leader of the free world, we’re falling behind, falling into a self-hatred so painful we block it from our conscious mind. In denial, we won’t take personal responsibility for our pain, our recovery. Instead, we get rid of it … get someone else to take our pain … someone to blame … someone “out there” to take these overwhelming feelings.

Americans can’t stand who we’ve become, what we’re done to ourselves, must blame someone, find someone to take away our painful self-hatred secret.

America needs Dr. Freud’s couch, to search for our lost soul

Welcome to the dark world of American self-hatred. Deny it all you want, it’s now trapped deep in our collective soul. David Rothkopf, editor of Foreign Policy, author of “Superclass,” “Power Inc.” and “Running the World,” recently captured the collective angst millions of self-hating Americans are carrying, fighting about, dying for, projecting onto neighbors, leaders, everyone, making others the enemy … avoiding the real enemy facing them in the mirror.

Listen to the collective self-hating American soul Rothkopf sees, the one tearing apart our nation. Imagine Dr. Freud here diagnosing, analyzing, advising the patient, 300 million angry Americans in pain. How do we get out of this deep, dark psychological hell hole? Listen, you’ve heard so many of these angry individual voices screaming their pains, targeting anyone and everybody, do you hear yourself?

“America is in decline … America is broke … America is unwilling to lead … America has alienated the world … America is fat … America is addicted to sugar, reality television,” and thanks to social media and selfies, America is “addicted to hearing itself speak.”

“Washington is dysfunctional …Washington is corrupt … Washington is full of liars, con men, and self-promoters … who prove that there is no limit to how far people can go in life if they have the right PAC spending dough behind them.”

Our self-loathing is so lethal says Rothkopf … “Americans are a violent people … narcissistic … misogynistic … puritanical, hyped up on religiosity … turning against science, math, and history … Americans don’t read … don’t work hard anymore … The American dream is dead … Today’s children will be the first generation who must learn to expect less, not more, than their parents had.”

Then, as any great student of Freud and Jung would do, Rothkopf intervenes, tells his patient to cut the crap, stop the whining: “Snap out of it, America. You’re good enough, smart enough — who cares if people don’t like you?” Rothkopf would make a great therapist, maybe for one, maybe even a million self-hating Americans. But not all.

Stop whining? Grow up? Take responsibility … maybe it’s too late

Today everyone wants the quick cure. But there really is no magic, quick-fix, snap-out-of-it solution. We didn’t see any with the few hundred we helped in therapy. Secrets are deep, lack of self-awareness enormous, resistance great, self-hatred projected on others powerful, so strong that if you multiply all the pain and anger of millions of angry Americans, it’s impossible to “snap out” fast, let alone change course. Therapy, recovery takes time, a luxury America has little of … it may be too late.

And how do we factor in the real enemies: Big Oil, the Koch Bros? Sen. Mitch McConnell’s army of GOP billionaires who, since the eve of his inauguration, hate everything Obama stands for? Tea partiers who hate all things government. Terrorists? Sadly, the “Great American Self-Hating Collective UnConsciousness” may be too big, hundreds of millions. With so many angry diverse voices feeding on their own hatred.

Moreover, America’s new hate-filled collective unconscious is not some brief psychological condition. Unfortunately, it’s systemic, may be permanently wired in America’s brain, psyche, soul. A massive self-destructive virus has taken control of America’s collective unconscious, our brain, our future.

This self-hatred analysis was reinforced by another column in the same Foreign Policy issue. Strategic-trend analysts Elbridge Colby and Paul Lettow ask: “Have We Hit Peak America?” Their answer: Yes. “American leadership in the world is imperiled. And at a fundamental level, the American people sense it. A number of recent polls show that more Americans than ever before, 60% in some cases, believe U.S. power is waning.”

Colby and Lettow see this new “declinist anxiety” sweeping America, supported by the facts: “The relative economic decline of the U.S. is a fact. For the first time in 200 years, most growth is occurring in the developing world, and the speed with which that shift, a function of globalization, has occurred is hard to fathom … in 1990 just 14% of cross-border flows of goods, services, and finances originated in emerging economies, today nearly 40% do. As recently as 2000, the GDP of China was one-tenth that of the United States; just 14 years later, the two economies are equal” Worse, a CNN poll “ found that Americans think by a 2-to-1 margin that their children’s lives will be worse than their own” doubting “the American dream.”

Image problem? No, we must face head-on the self-hatred in our soul

In spite of their dark data and darker forecasts, our Foreign Policy experts wrap up on a positive note: “While believing that America is doomed to decline is a fallacy, refusing to confront the problems that imperil its economic vitality would be no less a failing,” warn Colby and Lettow. “American strength and freedom of action are not rights to be inherited but outcomes to be earned. … It is time to play the long game.”

Long game? In today’s new chasing-the-hottest-trend world? Dominated by millions of social-media Twitter brains, folks with attention spans shorter than 30-second commercials? Manipulated by billionaires, Big Business, Big Banks, Big Oil, Big Government and Big Data with even shorter get-richer quick attention spans? No, what’s trending this moment always beats the “long game.”

Rothkopf laments the fact that “for the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the Earth, having ideas like these bouncing around the Internet and laced into talk-show banter sure does suggest that America has a nasty self-image problem. Call it body-politic-dysmorphia. Call it the self-hating superpower disease. Call the problem whatever you want … so long as you recognize the country needs to deal with it.” Instead, we’re deep in denial.

Unfortunately America has far more than an “image problem” that a fancy ad campaign might fix. There are too many signs that the collective unconscious of America’s hundreds of millions of self-haters has actually joined forces with their hated enemies. Yes! They are really in a classic conspiracy: Big Oil and Pinto owners, Big banks and credit-card holders, Big Business and shoppers buying essential goods, Big Tech and the rest of us endlessly searching for the next big thing, and so on.

Yes, America has a deep, dark, dangerous, self-destructive secret: We hate ourselves. We hate America. Yes, Americans are consumed with self-hatred. In denial, but won’t face our demons. America has “self-hating superpower disease,” as Rothkopf says. And it’s crushing our individual souls and our nation’s collective unconscious.

We do need to “recognize the country needs to deal with it.” But refuse. And the clock’s ticking. As Pogo famously put it: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Not someone out there. So get Freud, before we’re past that point of no-return … before it’s too late to change direction … before we self-destruct our great nation.

LOSING HIS MARBLES OVER GLOBAL WARMING

At one time Paul Farrell’s articles made sense. In the last year I think dementia has set in or someone at the Wall Street Journal told him what he was supposed to say from now on. He has been urging people to buy stocks at the all time high. Then he blathers about Wall Street being crooked.

He blames capitalism for all the woes in the world, when we don’t have anything resembling capitalism in the world. He is a global warming disciple on par with the grand poobah – Al Gore. His rhetoric is off the charts nutjob. The guy lives in San Luis Obisbo where the temperature never falls below 70 degrees. Send the fucker to my house. The wind chill tomorrow morning in Philadelphia will be 20 DEGREES BELOW ZERO. It will be the coldest day in over 20 years. Global warming my fat ass.

Farrell is an idiot in my humble opinion.

New ‘War of Worlds’: Capitalism vs. Planet Earth

Opinion: Global-warming rate today has impact of 400,000 daily A-bombs

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — There’s a new “War of the Worlds” raging, and this one is for real. Forget the pre–World War II radio hoax by Orson Welles. Flash forward to 2005 and the Steven Spielberg–Tom Cruise version ? No, flash a little further. New technologies making Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” dominate: new media, Twitter news, Google Glass, Big Data, Raymond Kurzweil’s “ Singularity .” Hot news. Staccato. Immediate. Now.

But how can we tell what’s fiction and fact? What is reality in this Big Money world?

In today’s bizarre reality of artificial intelligence and drones, there are only six really true facts you need to know about this new “War of the Worlds,” the final war between the old conspiracies of Big Money and Big Oil and Big Government and the Big TV Networks vs. an emerging but ragtag conspiracy of eco-activists and climate-change scientists and global-warming billionaires. This is all you need to know about your future and the fate of our world:

Fact 1: Wall Street’s fictional record highs

Like the Orson Welles hoax, the stock-market benchmark’s all-time highs are a fantasy. But, for now, they control the medium. Yes, the majority, the global “collective unconscious” actually believes that what it’s hearing in the media is factual. And most believe it when they hear from the news anchors that 2013 was the best year since the dot-com rally of the late 1990s.


New York Times

 

New York Times story on the effect of Orson Welles’s hoax on listeners.

But imagine a “War of the Worlds”–style cut-in: “We interrupt this program …” An alien invasion of Planet Earth, it says. Mushroom clouds. Panic ensues. And global retweeting. Once upon a time, in 1938 , we believed the cut-in. And maybe we still would. Except that today’s “alien invasion” is capitalism, attacking, dominating, depleting world resources.

So imagine that cut-in, today, with the message that Wall Street is winning. Big Money is winning again. And you, Main Street investor, are the loser.

 

 

 

 

On an inflation-adjusted basis, in today’s bizarrely zero-sum economy, Wall Street actually lost trillions in retirement funds for Main Street America’s 95 million investors, while inflating the inequality gaps. Yes, from 2000 to 2013, Wall Street was actually underwater.

Still, most of us believe what the Big Money–Wall Street conspiracy broadcasts. It owns the medium and, thus, the message.

Fact 2: Global warming is as deadly as 400,000 A-bombs — every day

Next, imagine alerts rapidly streaming across your monitor. Big headline flashing: “Earth’s rate of global warming is 400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day.” Suddenly, fade to black. An eerie silence. You wonder: Is this our new reality? We’re in the dark.

Facts really are stranger than fiction. No matter what new broadcast technologies deliver our news — TV, LinkedIn, Hulu, Google Glass, “Star Trek” mind melding, Kurzweil’s “Singularity”— the fact is this: Global warming is running at a rate of 400,000 A-bombs hitting Planet Earth daily, dangerously overheating our world, day after day after day.

Big Oil is fighting to keep that info off Big TV News. But the fact remains that the 400,000-daily-A-bombs headline is real. It was first posted on ThinkProgress.com and voiced by one of the world’s leading climate scientists, James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies from 1981 to 2013, in a 2012 TED Talk . But since Big Money rules today’s reality, even if the conspiracy loses a round, its perpetrators will invest heavily a comeback. They can’t afford to lose the “War of the Worlds.”

Fact 3: Just 90 companies trigger 63% of all global-warming pollution

This, from the Guardian , is a show stopper: “Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions: Chevron, Exxon and BP among companies most responsible for climate change since dawn of industrial age.” The opener hits harder: “We know who’s profiting from emissions—let’s bill them. Shell, BP, ExxonMobil and Chevron are some of the 90 entities discovered in a recently published research that contribute to most of the world’s emissions.”

Get it? Big Oil really is Big Polluter. “There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world,” observed Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute, who looked at methane and CO2 emissions from 1854 to 2010. “But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil, if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.” In effect, “Heede’s work debunks the myth that everyone (and therefore no one) is responsible for climate change.” In truth, Big Oil is Planet Earth’s biggest enemy.

Fact 4: ‘Big TV News’ conspires with Big Oil climate-science deniers

Wonder why you rarely hear about climate change on television news? Here’s why: Network television is a major climate-science denier in cahoots with Big Oil and all other climate-science deniers. Yes, to survive, “Big TV News” relies upon hundreds of millions of dollars a year in television ads from Big Oil.

The facts: About a month ago, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the leading media watchdog group exposing bias in the news, released a new survey of national newscasts on CBS, NBC and ABC: “Extreme weather is big news. In the first nine months of 2013, there were 450 segments of 200 words or more that covered extreme weather: flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes and heat waves.”

But, unfortunately, the television networks are now de facto climate-science deniers, aiding Big Oil. How? TV news consistently fails to analyze “the human-made climate change that is affecting … extreme weather.” Of those 450 segments, “just a tiny fraction, 16 segments, or 4% of the total … mentioned the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘greenhouse gases’ [while] 96% of extreme-weather stories never discussed the human impact on the climate.” Yes, Big Oil ad spending is influencing Big TV News.

Fact 5: 2013 was worst year in human history for climate change

If you owned stocks or are an ideological climate-science denier, you loved 2013. And you’ll ignore ThinkProgress’s “nine major reasons climate change, and the carbon pollution that drives it, helped make 2013 one of the worst years in human history”:

  • Global CO2 levels hit 400 parts per million in 2013 for the first time in recorded history
  • It’s getting hotter, faster
  • A huge number of animals and plants face extinction
  • The world suffered deadly heat, drought and wildfires
  • Choking pollution shut down population centers
  • Countries suffer disasters but still commit to doing even less about emissions
  • Sea levels broke records in 2013, amplifying the effects of storms and floods
  • Much of the world is doubling down on fossil fuels
  • We are woefully undercounting methane emissions

But few in Big TV News will broadcast this message about how humans cause climate change. We prefer to hear “Wall Street’s best year since 1997!” Better yet, tell us that “2014 will be better” and give us predictions of more big returns. And, yes, that’s what our brains, and the world’s collective unconscious, will hear because the conspiracy has Big Money on its side to control the media and message. Till it’s too late.

Fact 6: Both worlds are losing this new ‘War of the Worlds’

This “War of the Worlds” redux pits capitalism against Planet Earth. But, unfortunately, in today’s “War of the Worlds,” the old conspiracy of Big Money–Big Oil–Big Government–Big TV Networks is beating the ragtag eco-activists fighting against global warming and climate change.

How? Every single day Big Oil and other climate-change deniers are spending megabucks to control your mind, to manipulate what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Remember, just 90 organizations with a war chest of trillions are spending billions every day to get you to ignore that rate of 400,000 A-bombs a day — and not only that. They want to control your mind, the collective unconscious. The real “War of the Worlds” is for the control of your mind. And everyone else’s.

Why? Any admission that humans are responsible for climate change would result in new carbon-emission restrictions and taxes. Until then, the impact of those 400,000 daily atomic bombs exploding on Planet Earth remains in force, and the Big Money–Big Oil–Big Government–Big TV Networks conspiracy will keep winning. And Planet Earth will keep losing, unfortunately.

MUTANT CAPITALISM

This one makes you think. I think there is much truth in Farrell’s assessment. Fear of death does drive the actions of many in this world. I think this is part of the reason that history runs in cycles. Farrell concentrates on the narcissism and arrogance of individuals, but it is much more powerful when generations act in a similar manner. This is another confirmation of the Fourth Turning cycle theory. I also agree that Jamie Dimon is pure evil and I will rejoice when he is discredited and hopefully imprisoned for his crimes against America.

The ‘cult of capitalism’ and U.S. moral decline

Commentary: America is being led astray by narcissists

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Capitalism is now a cult, and Jamie Dimon is the self-appointed leader of the “cult of capitalism.”

That message is gleaned from a Huffington Post column by Mark Gongloff, whose headline stated that not only is the J.P. Morgan CEO and chairman a cult leader but a “very dangerous” one. Why? Because apparently shareholders have signed “a billion-year contract” to join the cult, notwithstanding portrayals of Dimon as a greedy egomaniac and poster boy for everything wrong with capitalism.

His is a monster of a cult: Warren Buffett is a member. So is CNBC’s Jim Cramer. Says Gongloff, who labels Cramer a “shouty man”: “Cramer joined Warren Buffett and many more VIPs in singing Dimon’s praises and warning of the woe that would befall shareholders” if they split his roles. Still, “the media played along, helping … Dimon keep both of his jobs” as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.’s chief executive and chairman.

Dimon, meanwhile, was doing what any self-respecting egomaniac under such a threat would do: acting like a petulant teenager and threatening to quit.

Today, reconfirmed as leader of the cult of capitalism, Dimon could serve as the perfect example of what psychologist Ernest Becker wrote about in his Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, “The Denial of Death,” a favorite from my years at Morgan Stanley. Dimon fits the cult-leader profile: charismatic narcissist, uncompromising, manipulating and threatening to his co-conspirators in the “cult of capitalism” and to the masses marching to the drumbeat of his destiny, off another economic cliff, bigger than 2008’s.


Reuters

Jamie Dimon.

The destiny of this cult of capitalism is also driven by historical trends that Dimon cannot see, trends beyond his control, beyond his leadership talents. Why? He is blinded, incapable of seeing the mega-billion-dollar danger Gongloff claims to have spotted dead ahead.

Is the new capitalism is destroying America’s morals?

Earlier, Dimon revealed himself as a doomsdayer with a self-destructive streak. I first wrote of this back in 2011. After Dimon spoke at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the headlines shouted: “Jamie Dimon Worries Financial Regulation Will Doom Banks Forever.” Reports followed: Dimon attacked Dodd-Frank as “the nail in the coffin of big American banks.” Doom? Coffin? No, over the top.

In analyzing this behavior, it does fit the diagnosis in Becker’s “The Denial of Death,” a classic analysis of why America is led by narcissists wired to self-destruct.

We now see what John Bogle call a “mutant” capitalism that no longer resembles Adam Smith’s inspiring economic principles enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. This type of capitalism has turned into an out-of-control virus destroying America’s moral values from within.


Vanguard

John Bogle, Vanguard Group founder.

Missing is an sense of honor and love of democracy that made me proud as a U.S. Marine sergeant. Missing is a balance of conservative free-market principles with liberal compassion. All that has vanished in the blind ideologies of today’s Ayn Rand clones demanding a return to a world that mimics the Wild West.

Wall Street narcissists and their blinding ‘denial of death’

When I was first at Morgan Stanley, I read a wide assortment of books, from Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” to “Supermoney” and “Powers of Mind.” Becker’s “Denial of Death” still haunts me. It took many readings over the years — plus a Ph.D. in psychology and later work as an interventionist with hundreds of executives, physicians, actors, rock stars, athletes, politicians, royalty and other celebrities — to fully comprehend its power.

Today Becker’s message seems obvious: Wall Street insiders really are their own worst enemies. Once again, as in 2000 and 2008, a million blind insiders are self-destructing.

Instead of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” we now have many hands of narcissistic egomaniacs driving this new cult of capitalism. The philosopher Sam Keen, author of “Hymns to an Unknown God,” wrote a great summary of Becker’s worldview in “Denial of Death.” Here are seven steps in the rise and demise of the cult of capitalism:

1. The world is terrifying, hostile and unsafe

Wall Street insiders, playing with billions, all face the same, deep angst in their souls. An inner war rages every day from birth. This world is “not Disneyland,” says Keen: “Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates,” brutishly “tearing others apart with teeth of all types — biting, grinding flesh.” This is our reality from birth until death. Both Hollywood and Wall Street remind us of it every day.

2. Fear of death haunts all humans, creating intense anxieties

The world “out there” is filled with mortal enemies. Our basic human motivation is a “biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.”

We adapt, enduring the pain of existence in a cruel world, anxious, “helpless, abandoned in a world where we are fated to die.” We live, relates Keen, in “terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression — and with all this yet to die.” Yes, it sounds like an endless summer of Hollywood blockbusters, repeating on an endless loop in our brains.

3. So we invent clever ways to quiet our anxiety, deny our fears

Every day, we try to deny this reality, block the fears from our minds: to survive, raise a family, be productive.

Denial is the “first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness.” So, writes Keen, “we hide in our phony defense mechanisms” to “feel safe … able to pretend that the world is manageable.” As do all capitalists. “But the price we pay is high,” Keen continues. “We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality,” but “life escapes us while we huddle within our defended fortress.”

4. Our goal: Escape death, be an immortal hero saving the world

Here’s where the human brain is at its most brilliant, most evident with cult leaders: “Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence,” says Keen. For all cultures create “a hero system that allows us to believe we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market.”

And not just individuals but “corporations and nations may be driven by unconscious motives that have little to do with their stated goals.” Each driven by leaders whose unconscious motives have more to do with overcoming their anxieties about death as a hero. In fact, the motivations of leaders “making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently have less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth,” while, deep inside, they remain our cult leaders, selfish, self-seeking, little narcissistic egomaniacs.

5. Our heroic ventures create enemies, backfire, counterattack

This is the final act for capitalists and for capitalism. As Keen puts it, “our heroic projects aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world.” America vs. China, Republicans vs Democrats, etc. But the real war is always within us. Each of us projects our inner demons onto the real world. To distract us from our fear of death. And in our denials we convince ourselves we are immortal. In our minds we become as gods. And yet deep inside every hero quest to save the world are buried childhood fears, ancient terrors. And eventually this shadow world turns real, the game backfires, and old fears resurface, fighting back.

6. Our denial-of-death quest creates a blind hero

In Becker’s psychological reality we soon discover that “one of the key concepts for understanding man’s urge to heroism is the idea of narcissism.” Freud “discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus.” We are “hopelessly absorbed with ourselves.” And 2,500 years of history has “not changed man’s basic narcissism.” In fact, “most of the time … practically everyone is expendable except ourselves.” We are indispensible. Forever. Immortal. We know best, for greed is always good in the cult of capitalism.

7. Escape into enlightenment? Sorry, but it gets worse

You ask: Is there hope for becoming a hero? Happy endings? Solutions? New strategies to get rich in recessions and bear markets? No.

As with Sartre’s existentialism, Becker sees no escape, “no exit” from the human condition — our denial of death, our destiny, our self-inflicted hell.

You’re trapped in a no-win drama: Even if you do get enlightened, your new enlightened state you will suffer a new awareness — that the cult of capitalism continues unenlightened, blind, driven to self-destruct by forces unseen and un-comprehended until it’s too late.

And unfortunately that leaves 300 million Americans trapped in the cult’s drama, where Wall Street’s greedy narcissists are unwittingly sabotaging the economy, lost in their silent conspiracy, controlling the invisible hand, in a costly war that will again lead, as in 2000 and 2008, to the fulfillment of the death wish of the cult of capitalism.

POPULATION PROBLEM?

After reading this article I was curious as to how much the world population grows each year. Farrell is wrong with his 50 million per month figure. The world adds 84 million people per year. Every four years the world adds a United States population to the world. That sounds unsustainable considering the amount of oil, food, and water on this planet. What Farrell ignores is the likelihood of a Fourth Turning war. Nothing like a thermonuclear exchange to get world population back in alignment. 

Why big-money men ignore world’s biggest problem

Commentary: We’re not dealing with the overpopulation disaster

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Last year Bill Gates said if he had “one wish to improve humanity’s lot over the next 50 years” he would pick an “energy miracle,” some magical “new technology that produced energy at half the price of coal with no carbon-dioxide emissions,” says CNN editor Fareed Zakaria in the New York Times.

And he said “he’d rather have this wish than a new vaccine or medicine or even choose the next several American presidents.”

Energy miracle? But that’s not where he’s giving his billions. In fact, since 1994 the Gates Foundation has spent over $26 billion on philanthropic projects, ventures and innovations, lots in vaccines and medicines that extend life, increase mortality rates and encourage population growth.

Yes, all good stuff, but ultimately undermining the possibility of discovering a magical energy miracle.

Worse, if that energy miracle is discovered anywhere its value could easily be wiped out by the world’s out-of-control population growth, forecast to reach 10 billion by 2050 from 7 billion today, one brief generation.

So why is Gates not focusing solely in his energy miracle? Better yet, why is he ignoring what he agrees is the world’s biggest problem? Even undermining the solution?

Warren Buffett: Don’t ‘play safe’ with my billions, hit a home run

What happened to Gates and his $26 billion mission? When Warren Buffett added more than $30 billion to Gates’s foundation a few years back, Buffett said: “Don’t just go for safe projects. Take on the really tough problems.”

Well, to put it bluntly folks, the Gates Foundation is not spending the money on the “really tough problems.” It is indeed playing it safe.

So what does Gates see as the world’s other “biggest problem?” Not global warming. Nor poverty. Not peak oil. The absolute biggest? One like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb? One that could throw a monkey wrench into global economic growth, end capitalism, even destroy civilization? The one that if not solved soon renders all efforts to solve all the other global problems — including global warming, poverty and fossil fuel depletion — irrelevant, futile and impossible ever to solve?

Overpopulation. That was the consensus “biggest problem” when a group of billionaires that included Gates got together at a secret meeting in Manhattan a couple of years ago.

Get it? Out-of-control population is the world’s No. 1 problem. Yet, governments with their $65 trillion global GDP aren’t even trying to solve the world’s overpopulation problem. They’re clueless. Can these philanthropists and their billions stop the coming disaster? No. In fact, their billions are accelerating the problem.

So what will shock the world awake? A catastrophe. Only a major disaster, a massive global collapse bigger than anything in world history is needed to alter the inevitable.

2 billion past Peak Population

Scientists estimate that the Earth’s natural resources can reasonably support about 5 billion people. We already have 7 billion. Get it? We’re 2 billion over Earth’s carrying capacity. Plus we’re racing headlong to 10 billion by 2050, adding over 50 million more each month.

Simple math, high school economics and minimal psychological common sense tells us we’re deep in denial and headed into a disaster.

And still, no adults are dealing with overpopulation, the “toughest of all problems.” Instead, they’re dealing with “safe projects” that make them feel good in the moment, short-term solutions that ironically make the long-term problem worse not better.

The truth is that Gates and his billionaire buddies are in denial, trapped in what Mother Jones columnist Julia Whitty calls “The Last Taboo.” She says population is hidden in a “conspiracy of silence” that “unites the Vatican, lefties, conservatives and scientists” and now the world’s richest philanthropists have joined this “conspiracy of silence.”

Scientific American also warned that population is “the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.” Why? Politicians ignore this “last taboo,” denying the fact that if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we’d need six Earths just to survive today.

Check the math: First World citizens now consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World. Now they want what we have.

By 2050, with a population of 10 billion, including 1.4 billion each in China and India, we are in effect committing suicide.

How Gates efforts ripple, undermining the future of the planet

“One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse,” warns Jared Diamond, an environmental biologist and author of “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Many “share a sharp curve of decline,” that often begins “only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.”

Some warn: “It’s already too late.” “We’re past the point of no return.”

Gates billionaire buddies should reexamine the effect of the world’s out-of-control population problem as it ripples through the lens of Diamond’s “collapse equation.” It’s very simple: “More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources … There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth.”

So take a moment and ask yourself how the world’s explosive population growth from seven to 10 billion in one short generation, plus their increasing demand for more resources per capita, will ripple through Diamond’s other 10 key variables:

1. Energy

Oil, natural gas, coal: They’re all near or past their tipping points. With costs accelerating, new technologies and alternatives, biofuels, solar, nuclear power, will never be enough. Unfortunately, by 2050 demand for fossil fuels will still be 80% for 10 billion.

2. Food

Two billion global poor live on $2 a day, depend on fish and wild foods that are dying off for protein. Increasing food prices make matters worse. Green revolution failing: United Nations study says new production technologies have not improved food access.

3. Water

Water problems destroyed many earlier civilizations: Today a million lack safe drinking water. By 2015 two-thirds of the world will live in water-stressed countries.

4. Farmland

Water, wind eroding crop soils many times faster than new formation.

5. Forests

We’re losing rain forests and protective timber reserves at accelerating rates.

6. Chemicals

Our air, soil, oceans, lakes and rivers are dying from toxic chemicals.

7. Solar energy

Sunlight’s limited. By 2050 we’ll use 100% photosynthetic capacity.

8. Ozone layer

Our CO2 is destroying our ozone protection, reducing solar energy.

9. Diversity

Wild species, populations, genetic diversity, lost, rest out of balance.

10. Alien species

Transferring species to new lands destroying native species.

Diamond’s historical research tells us that leaders are myopic, motivated more by self-interest, expediency and money than by courage, convictions and long-term thinking. They fail to act in time. Unprepared, their worlds crumble fast. They may respond to a catastrophe. But in the end, history tells us over and over that most leaders live in denial, avoiding timely decisions, failing even in time of crises, till it’s too little, too late.

Gates’s Billionaire Philanthropist Club probably knows in their hearts the truth. They’re not in denial. They’ve given up. The problem will never be solved. So they’re not even trying to fix the overpopulation problem, instead, focusing on short-term feel-good efforts, knowing that in the not-too-distant future the planet, our civilization and the human species will fade to black.

Let’s pray that Uncle Warren gets back into the game demanding they “don’t just go for safe projects. Take on the really tough problems.”

RICK PERRY – CHINA’S CHOICE?

I think Farrell is a little too believing in this piece. Anyone can extrapolate today’s numbers 30 years into the future and arrive at an answer that looks like China will dominate the world. Anyone who extrapolated the Japanese “miracle” economy in 1988 twenty three years into the future would have come up with a far different result than the economic disaster that is Japan today. Extrapolation is for fools. Farrell completely ignores Peak Oil and China’s demographic nightmare caused by their one child policy.

If the European and American economies continue on a downward trajectory, who does Farrell think China is going to sell their shit to? This is really a thoughtless cheerleading piece devoid of the harsh realities facing the world. Rick Perry may be a dumbass, but he is a dangerous dumbass. He will likely lead the US into a Fourth Turning war. If the war is against China, don’t expect a positive result for either country. If China really wants Perry to win, they may be sorry for what they wish for.

Why China would love ‘President Rick Perry’

Commentary: China wins economically with an ‘inconsequential’ America

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — China must be secretly rooting for a guy like Rick Perry as the next U.S. president. They’d love competing against an America led by another Texas governor who talks from a big hat, loves war spending and tea parties, thinks the Fed chairman is acting “treasonous,” believes Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” and admits he’s an antiscience, antievolution, anti-intellectual who will turn back the clock to the 19th century frontier Wild West.

Yes, China’s rooting for a guy who will not only make Washington “inconsequential” for all Americans, he’ll make America “inconsequential” in a world where China knows that its competitive edge and economic growth all hinge on investing in science, innovation and intellectuals with a vision of the future.

You can bet China’s leaders are cheering for a president who’ll stall the American economy even further while China races ahead of us in the global economic war. China would probably settle for the other leading GOP candidate, that ex-governor whose values shift with the latest polls and Tea Party questions … whatever happened to the GOP’s Bill Buckley soul?

China’s commie-capitalism beating GOP’s Reaganomics since 2000

Adam Smith’s original 1776 capitalism made America the world’s greatest superpower. We’ve lost that too. So America’s now in a handicap race with China, and losing. Why?

In just the past decade China’s state-run hybrid commie-capitalism has beaten the American economy, going from a “poor country” to racing ahead to global economic dominance. Unfortunately, our politicians just don’t get it. They’re like high school teens fighting a turf war who can’t see the building’s burning down.

In his “Triumph of Politics Over Economics,” Reagan’s budget director David Stockman warns: “America’s at a crossroads struggling to redefine ourselves, at a time when even Reagan couldn’t win the GOP nomination. Why? Because myopic politicians have hijacked the economy. Politicians are the new economists. Politicians now run the economy, puppets of the Super Rich and special-interest lobbyists.”

Stockman calls this corrupt system Crony Capitalism. We call it Reaganomics and Doomsday Capitalism, a sellf-destructive ideology that works to China’s advantage.

Here are 11 reasons China’s leaders would love an inconsequential president making America inconsequential in China’s march to economic world domination:

1. China’s economy: $123 trillion, 3 times America’s by 2040

In an eye-opening Foreign Policy cover story last year titled “$123,000,000,000,000: Why China’s economy will grow to $123 trillion by 2040,” Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago writes about China’s unbelievable leap forward. Back in 2000, just one decade ago, China was a “poor country” when the GOP and its “war president” took over control of America, announcing that “debt doesn’t matter.”

Yes, by 2040 “the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union … much higher than that of India and Japan … the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman … Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth … China’s share of global GDP— 40% — will dwarf that of the United States (14%) and the EU (5%) 30 years from now,” one brief generation.

2. China’s political system is more capitalist than America’s

“The Chinese political system is likely not what you think,” says Fogel, “Most economic reforms, including the most successful ones, have been locally driven and overseen.” Today there’s “more criticism and debate in upper echelons of policymaking.”

Fogel attends meetings of the Chinese Economists Society. Many economists are openly “critical of the Chinese government,” will even “point out that the latest decision by the finance ministry is flawed … even publish a critical letter in a Beijing newspaper.”

3. China is rapidly turning into a capitalist consumer economy

Yes, “China’s long-repressed consumerist tendencies” are exploding,” says Fogel: “In many ways, China is the most capitalist country in the world right now.”

Get it? While we borrow from China then waste money fighting wars, while Wall Street and the Super Rich are amassing wealth in the hands of the top 1%, “in the big Chinese cities, living standards and per capita income are at the level of countries the World Bank would deem ‘high middle-income,’ with a clear, growing affinity for acquiring clothes, electronics, fast food, automobiles.”

Why? Because China’s leaders “made the judgment that increasing domestic consumption will be critical to China’s economy, and a host of domestic policies now aim to increase Chinese consumers’ appetite for acquisitions.”

4. China’s massive investments in education, ahead of America

China’s making “enormous investments” in education, says Fogel. They know “educated workers are much more productive workers. … college-educated workers are three times as productive … a high school graduate is 1.8 times as productive as a worker with less than a ninth-grade education.”

In the next generation China’s high school enrollment rate could reach 100%, the college rate about 50%, adding “more than 6 percentage points to the country’s annual economic growth rate.” Meanwhile, America runs up massive debts wasting trillions on wars, shortchanging education.

5: China’s locking up global resources, using U.S. dollar reserves

The title of a Malcolm Knox feature in BusinessWeek says it all: “The deal is simple. Australia gets money. China gets Australia.” Wake up America: While our clueless myopic politicians are fighting self-destructive election turf wars, China is using its reserves (U.S. dollars!) to buy rights to Australia’s commodities and natural resources, giving China long-term access to natural gas, minerals, iron ore.

And that’s just one continent: China’s quietly buying up future rights to commodity-resources worldwide.

6. China’s rural economy of 700 million adding to growth rate

Go beyond the Shanghai high-rises and Guangdong factories,” says Fogel. You’ll see “changes afoot in the Chinese countryside … an under-appreciated economic engine.”

From 1978 to 2003 China’s labor productivity averaged about 6%. In the future, productivity will also increase in rural areas, for about 700 million or half of China. “That large rural sector is responsible for about a third of Chinese economic growth today” and will explode as a new generation adds another hundred million.

7. China’s government statistics underreporting progress

Don’t be misled by reports that “Chinese data are flawed or deliberately inflated in key ways,” says Fogel. Just the opposite: Their “statisticians may well be underestimating economic progress … Small firms often don’t report their numbers to the government.”

And as in America, “official estimates of GDP badly underestimate national growth” because they don’t “take into account improvements in services such as education and health care.” In short, “the rapid growth of China’s service sector makes the underestimation more pronounced.”

8: Yes, China does have a long-range plan to conquer America

China is America’s worst nightmare, engaged in economic warfare against us on multiple fronts: Stealing millions of jobs, stealing U.S. state secrets, stealing proprietary patents, stealing technology, stealing our wealth. China has also forged strategic alliances with our enemies, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. China is engaged in a not-so-secret cyber-war against America.

Ross Terrill, a China expert at Harvard, wrote in the Wilson Quarterly: “The Chinese Communists are very aware of this contest with the United States, though Americans (beyond the Pentagon) are not.” Terrill warns: “By being a shrinking violet, the United States would simply hand over the future to China.”

9: China’s aware of Pentagon strategies, is one-upping generals

You know China’s generals have copies of the Pentagon’s strategic war manual. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warns of China’s long-range plans beyond waging “economic warfare” and tying up long-term natural resources.

Krugman says China’s actions tell us they’re planning long-term military strategies as well as economic war. He warns that in the near future, some seemly inconsequential incident may provoke “dangerously trigger-happy” Chinese leaders into escalating from defensive military strategies to a preemptive strike to advance China’s economic power.

10. The “Goldman Conspiracy” is helping China sabotage America

Li Delin’s “The Goldman Sachs Conspiracy” was a best seller in China. His Chinese readers love his vivid description: “Goldman Sachs knows when to go for your neck” like a “Manchurian tiger.”

Actually China’s playing a clever game: As author Matt Taibbi might say, China is now a “vampire squid wrapped around the face of Goldman, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into Goldman’s capital, talent and connections.” Eventually China will suck the life out of Goldman.

11. By 2040 China will be the world’s biggest superpower (again)

“To the West, the notion of a world in which the center of global economic gravity lies in Asia may seem unimaginable,” says Fogel. “But it wouldn’t be the first time. … China was the world’s largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries. … While Europe was fumbling in the Dark Ages and fighting disastrous religious wars, China cultivated the highest standards of living in the world. Today, the notion of a rising China is, in Chinese eyes, merely a return to the status quo.”

And thanks to guys like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Barack Obama, the Goldman Conspiracy and buddies, China is destined to once again become the world’s superpower by 2040, when China’s economy is three times bigger than America’s.

WHY WORLD WAR III IS INEVITABLE

Paul Farrell lives in San Luis Obispo. It is a beautiful place.

How does he manage to write such dire articles while living in paradise? This time it is about our population time bomb. He does a good job detailing the problem, but he doesn’t seem to have the guts to make a recommendation. How do you curtail population growth? China instituted a policy and it will end up destroying their economy. Should we sterilize dumb people? There really is no acceptable policy other than handing out condoms to the ignorant masses and hope they figure out what to do with them.

Therefore, his point has validity. The only way that the population growth will be curtailed is a good old world war. You kill off a few hundred million young men across the world and they don’t have babies. Sounds like a plan. This should occur near the end of this Fourth Turning. I reckon WW III should arrive around 2020.

Have a nice day, and use a condom.

Population bomb: 9 billion march to WWIII

Commentary: Can anyone halt this economic explosive?

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Sshh. Don’t tell anyone. But “while you are reading these words, four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children.” Seventeen words. Four deaths. That statistic is from a cover of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 provocative “Population Bomb.”

By the time you finish this column, another five hundred will die. By starvation. Mostly kids. Dead.

But global population will just keep growing, growing, growing. Why? The math is simple: Today there are more than two births for every death worldwide. One death. Two new babies.

Bomb? Tick-tick-ticking? Or economic bubble? Population growth is a basic assumption hard-wired in traditional economic theory. Unquestioned. Yes, population is our core economic problem. Not a military problem. But the bigger this economic bubble grows, the more we all sink into denial, the closer the point of no return where bubble becomes bomb, where war is the only alternative.

Yes, folks, ultimately population growth is an economic nuclear bomb, tick-tick-ticking a silent countdown to global disaster. In denial, we march a self-destructive path to WWIII.

Simple math: One death + two births = America’s poison pill

Worldwide population doubled to 3.5 billion between the Great Depression and the Great Society. One generation, from the ‘30s to the ‘60s when “The Population Bomb” was published. Since the ‘60s, we’ve doubled again. This year global population shot past seven billion. Two billion living in poverty, surviving on less than two dollars a day. We do live in a globalized economy. And the math is simple: One death, two births.

Warning: This economic bomb will not stop tick-ticking any time soon. Why? Scientific American said population is “the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.” No wonder Bill McKibben, author of “The End of Nature,” warns: “Act now, we’re told, if we want to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Trouble is, it might be too late. The science is settled, and the damage has already begun.”

We’re on suicide watch and yet population control, the world’s No. 1 economic issue in “off the table.” Why? Last year Mother Jones made it abundantly clear why. In “The Last Taboo,” columnist Julia Whitty asked: “What unites the Vatican, lefties, conservatives and scientists in a conspiracy of silence? Population.” That hot-button issue ignites so many powerful reactions. Politicians won’t touch this third rail.

Our denial is a massive “conspiracy of silence.” Yes, we’re all in this global self-destructive conspiracy. Families love making babies. Economists obsess about their population-growth assumption.

Stockholders demand earnings growth. Wall Street is insatiable. Corporate CEOs shoot for quarterly targets to get ever bigger bonuses. The global Super Rich see population growth as opportunities to increase their wealth, widening the wealth gap. We’re all in this rat race together, in a “conspiracy of silence.”

Population is the key economic power driving all economic issues

Yes, you can forget “Peak Oil.” Forget global warming. Forget debt, deficits, defaults. Forget commodities, scarce resource depletion. Forget all other economic, political, military problems. Yes, forget all of them. None of them matter … if our leaders fail to deal with the world’s out-of-control population bomb. Nothing else matters. Nothing.

Still, the silence is defining. We’re trapped in this deafening “conspiracy of silence.” Neutered. Blind to this suicidal path, incapable and unwilling to face the greatest single economic challenge in history. Won’t wake up till it’s too late.

Why? Deep in our hearts we see no acceptable universal solution. So we wait … until this economic bomb stops tick-tick-ticking. Explodes in our faces. Till the wake-up call, a total economic collapse. Till then, the silence is deafening. We stay in denial. Waiting.

The United Nations predicts there will be nine billion or more humans on Earth by 2050. And while demographers want us to believe total population will level off, they’re just guessing. Depending on an unpredictable range of mathematical scenarios, maybe our planet could top 15 billion by 2100, all demanding a better lifestyle, all demanding more natural resources, more commodities, starting revolutions to achieve their economic goals.


Reuters

Demonstrators shout slogans as they crowd Madrid’s Neptuno plaza near Spanish parliament in Madrid last week.Tens of thousands of Spaniards abandoned their customary Sunday quiet day with families and friends to march against the so-called “Euro Pact” and the handling of the economic crisis.

But the economic problem isn’t just the simple math of adding more bodies. “What really counts,” says Jared Diamond in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” “is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment,” the “per-capita impact.” First World citizens “consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World.”

So the race to 2050 rages on: “Low impact people are becoming high-impact people” demanding “First World living standards.” But unfortunately, if all nations in the world consumed resources at the same rate as Americans, we’d need six Earths just to survive. Today.

Worse, the competition’s growing and we’re outnumbered. While America grows from 300 million to a 400 million by 2050, the rest of the world explodes into a nine billion bubble, with over 1.4 billion each in China and India. The bomb keeps tick-ticking.

Pentagon warns of ‘desperate all-out wars for food, water, energy’

What a “conspiracy of silence.” Seems everybody’s on the “economic growth” bandwagon. And with population growth comes chaos, anger, war. Remember 2011: Unemployed college kids in the Arab Spring. Higher pay for China’s workers. Wisconsin unions revolt. Warning, by 2100 the science-fiction solutions of “Avatar” and “Wall*E” will be reexamined seriously, perhaps even the unthinkable in the “Boomsday” novel.

WWIII is no fiction. We’re in the buildup now. During the Bush era, Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting that “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.” Population unrest would then create “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.” Soon “there is little doubt that something drastic is happening … as the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies” with “warfare defining human life.”

Forget “Peak Oil.” The real economic force behind “Peak Oil” is “Peak Population.” Fail to defuse the population bomb and experts on sites like LifeAftertheOilCrash.com make clear the inevitable consequences of our denial, silence and inaction: “Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult … it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists, bankers and investors in the world.”

We are at the tipping point: Failing to defuse the population bomb guarantees global economic collapse.

Throughout history, myopic leaders never act … till it’s too late

Will our leaders rise to the occasion? History says no. Diamond put all this in perspective in “Collapse”: “One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians, realize that a primary cause of the collapse of those societies has been the destruction of the natural resources on which they depend. Fewer still appreciate that many of those civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.” Tick, tick, tick ….

So what is this one common flaw that drives nations to collapse worldwide and over the centuries? Diamond says leaders “focused only on issues likely to blow up in the next 90 days,” lacking the will “to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions.” Their short-term thinking, unfortunately, sets the stage for a rapid “sharp curve of decline.”

And given the myopic mind-set consuming American politicians today, it’s easy to see how the daily trench warfare of the 2012 presidential campaign is connected to the Pentagon’s prediction of WWIII, of “desperate all-out wars” dead ahead.

Unfortunately, that is the end game of our “conspiracy of silence,” our unwillingness to confront the inevitable. Our inaction means war will be the ultimate economic solution: For America, for capitalism, for civilization, for Planet Earth. The bomb just keeps tick-tick-ticking. Nothing can, nothing will, stop this tick-ticking population bomb. Nothing, except a global nuclear economic bomb.

Sshh, quiet, you’ll wake the babies.

SUPER RICH

It still amazes me that a MSM outlet allows Paul Farrell to write such revolutionary articles. I applaud him. He’s got a big set of cajones. His article is full of truth. I think George Carlin and Paul would have gotten along just great.

Tax the Super Rich now or face a revolution

Commentary: A ‘Super-Rich Delusion’ is leading us to ruin

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, tax the Super Rich. Tax them now. Before the other 99% rise up, trigger a new American Revolution, a meltdown and the Great Depression 2.

Revolutions build over long periods — to critical mass, a flash point. Then they ignite suddenly, unpredictably. Like Egypt, started on a young Google executive’s Facebook page. Then it goes viral, raging uncontrollably. Can’t be stopped. Here in America the set-up is our nation’s pervasive “Super-Rich Delusion.”

We know the Super Rich don’t care. Not about you. Nor the American public. They can’t see. Can’t hear. Stay trapped in their Forbes-400 bubble. An echo chamber that isolates them. They see the public as faceless workers, customers, taxpayers. See GOP power on the ascent. Reaganomics is back. Unions on the run. Clueless masses are easily manipulated.

Even Obama is secretly working with the GOP, will never touch his Super Rich donors. Yes, the Super-Rich Delusion is that powerful, infecting all America.

Here’s how one savvy insider who knows described this Super-Rich Delusion: “The top 1% live privileged lives, aren’t worried about much. Families vacation at the best resorts. Their big concerns are finding the best Pilates teacher, best masseuse, best surgeons, best private schools. They aren’t concerned with the underlying deterioration of America or the world, except in the abstract, because they aren’t directly affected by it. That’s not to say they aren’t sympathetic, aware, or don’t talk about the issues you bring up. They are largely concerned with protecting and enhancing their socio-economic positions, ensuring their families live well. And nothing you write about will change things.”

Warning, in 2011 that attitude is delusional, deadly, yet pervasive in America.

Super Rich replaying “Great Gatsby” age, won’t learn till it’s too late

Our top 1% honestly believe they’re immune, protected from the unintended consequences of beating down average Americans for three decades with the free-market, trickle-down Reaganomics doctrines that made them Super Rich.

They honestly believe those same doctrines will protect them in the next depression. Why? Because they have megabucks stashed away. Provisions for the long haul. Live in gated compounds with mercenaries guarding them.

They believe they’ll continue living just fine in a depression. But you won’t. Nor will your retirement. Neither will the rest of America. And still the Super Rich don’t care, “except in the abstract, because they aren’t directly affected.”

Warning: The Super-Rich Delusion has pushed us to the edge of a great precipice: Remember the Roaring Twenties? The Crash of 1929? Great Depression? Just days before the crash one leading economist, Irving Fisher, predicted that stocks had “reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

Yes, he was trapped in the “Great Gatsby Syndrome,” an earlier version of today’s Super-Rich Delusion. It was so blinding in 1929 that the president, Wall Street, all America were sucked in … until the critical mass hit a mysterious flash point, triggering the crash.

Yes, we’re reliving that past — never learn, can’t hear. And oddly it’s not just the GOP’s overreach, the endlessly compromising Obama, too-greedy-to-fail Wall Street banksters, U.S. Chamber of Commerce billionaires and arrogant Forbes 400. America’s entire political, financial and economic psyche is infected, as if our DNA has been rewired.

The Collective American Brain is trapped in this Super-Rich Delusion, replaying the run-up to the ’29 Crash.

Nobody predicted 2011 revolutions in the oil-rich Arab world either

Warning: Mubarak, Gaddafi, Ali, Assad, even the Saudis also lived in the Super-Rich Delusion. Have for a long time. Were vulnerable. Ripe for a revolution. They, too, honestly believed they were divinely protected, chosen for great earthly wealth, enjoyed great armies.

Then, suddenly, out of the blue, a new “educated, unemployed and frustrated” generation turned on them, is now rebelling, demanding their share of economic benefits, opportunities, triggering revolutions, seeking retribution.

Still, you don’t believe there’s a depression ahead here in America? The third great market crash of the 21st century? A new economic revolution about to blow up in our faces? No, you don’t believe, can’t believe … you, me, we are all infected by the Super-Rich Delusion, just as Americans were in the Roaring Twenties.

Check the stats folks: The last time America’s wealth gap between the Super Rich and the other 99% was this big was just before the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression.

You can’t remember? Or you won’t? America is trapped in “terminal denial,” a setup for failure. Too many still live in the false hope of this Super-Rich Delusion. Do you believe government stats hyping a recovery? Believe Wall Street’s nonsense about a new bull market ahead? Believe Exxon-Mobile’s misleading ads about energy stocks. Believe Bill Gross’ when he says dump Treasurys, and buy his emerging country bonds? Dream on.

Start preparing for the third meltdown of the 21st Century, and depression

Denial and lies. Remember, 93% of what you hear about markets, finance and the economy are guesses, wishful thinking and lies intended to manipulate you into making decisions that suck money from your pockets into Wall Street. They get rich telling lies about securities. They hate any SEC fiduciary rules forcing them to tell the truth.

But the fact is, on an inflation-adjusted basis, Wall Street lost 20% of your retirement money in the decade from 2000 to 2010, over $10 trillion. And “Irrational Exuberance’s” Robert Shiller warns of a third meltdown coming. You better start preparing now.

Before you start betting any more at Wall Street’s rigged casinos, think long and hard about these six megatoxins lurking in America’s Super-Rich Delusion, a mind-altering pandemic infecting our nation’s leadership in Washington, Corporate America and Wall Street … but also “trickling down,” infecting many Americans. Listen:

1. Warning: Super Rich want tax cuts, creating youth unemployment

Bloomberg warns: “The Kids Are Not Alright.” Worldwide, youth unemployment is fueling the revolution. In a New York Times column, Matthew Klein, a 24-year-old Council on Foreign Relations researcher, draws a parallel between the 25% unemployment among Egypt’s young revolutionaries and the 21% for young American workers: “The young will bear the brunt of the pain” as governments rebalance budgets. Taxes on workers will be raised and spending on education will be cut while mortgage subsidies and entitlements for the elderly are untouchable,” as will tax cuts for the rich. Opportunities lost. “How much longer until the rest of the rich world” explodes like Egypt?

2. Warning: rich get richer on commodity prices, poor get angrier

USA Today’s John Waggoner warns: “Soaring food prices send millions into poverty, hunger: Corn up 52% in 12 months. Sugar 60%. Soybeans 41%. Wheat 24%. For 44 million the “rise in food prices means a descent into extreme poverty and hunger, warns the World Bank.” Many causes: Speculators. Soaring oil prices. Trade policies. Population explosion. But altogether they expose “the underlying inequalities and issues related to the standard of living that boil beneath the surface,” says a Pimco manager.

3. Warning: Global poor ticking time bomb targeting Super Rich

A Time special report, “Poor vs. Rich: A New Global Conflict” warned that a “conflict between two worlds — one rich, one poor — is developing, and the battlefield is the globe itself.” Just 25 developed nations of 750 million citizens consume most of the world’s resources, produce most of its manufactured goods and enjoy history’s highest standard of living.” But they’re now facing 100 underdeveloped poor nations with 2 billion people with hundreds of millions living in poverty all demanding “an ever larger share of that wealth.” Think Egypt. British leader calls this a “time bomb for the human race.”

4. Warning: Next revolution coming across ‘Third World America’

We are ripe for one: In “Third World America” Arianna Huffington warns: “Washington rushed to the rescue of Wall Street but forgot about Main Street … One in five Americans unemployed or underemployed. One in nine families unable to make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans on food stamps. Upward mobility has always been at the center of the American Dream … that promise has been broken… The American Dream is becoming a nightmare.” Soon it will implode. a meltdown, revolution, depression.

5. Warning: Super Rich must be detoxed of their greed addiction

In “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With the Bill),” David Cay Johnston, warns that the rich are like addicts, and to “the addicted, money is like cocaine, too much is never enough.” A few years ago an elite 300,000 Americans in “the top tenth of 1% of income had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the economic lower half of our population.” The Super Rich Delusion is an addiction that requires a painful detox.

6. Warning: Politicians infected by Super-Rich Delusion, revolution

In “Washington’s Suicide Pact,” Newsweek’s Ezra Klein warns: “Congress is careening toward the worst of all worlds: massive job losses and an exploding deficit.” How bad? As many as 700,000 more jobs lost, says Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi. What a twist: Remember vice president Dick Cheney said “deficits don’t matter.” Today the GOP is so blinded by its obsession to destroy Obama’s presidency, deficits are now the only thing they say matters.

Wake up folks. The Super-Rich Delusion is destroying the American Dream for the rest of us. The Super Rich don’t care about you. They’re already stockpiling for the economic time bomb dead ahead. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Time for you to plan ahead for the coming revolution, for another depression.

REVOLUTION COMING TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD

The coming gridlock after the 2010 elections will not solve our problems. This ain’t 1994. The linear thinkers have no clue. Farrell’s article fits perfectly with the Fourth Turning scenario that we have entered. Revolution and war are on the way. The linearists are trying to figure out what the Dow will be tomorrow or next week. They will be completely blindsided, as usual. I can picture the clueless look on Maria Bartiromo’s face when the shit hits the fan. She’ll lash out angrily against the masses. They will turn her Escalade over and burn it.

America on the brink of a Second Revolution

Commentary: 2010 elections guarantee gridlock, anti-capitalist class war

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — “What’s distinctive about the Tea Party is its anarchist streak — its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns,” warns Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek. But why not three cheers for the Tea Party Express?

Admit it, something historic is brewing. And yes, it’s good for America, even the anarchy. Revolution is renewal. Tea-baggers want to take on both parties, “restore honor” and “take back the country.” Bring it on, the feeling’s mutual.

OK, maybe most Americans just silently mimic the words, “we’re mad as hell, won’t take it any more.” But watch out: After November the campaign’s shrill rhetoric explodes into action.

Tea-baggers are kicking the revolution into high gear. Debt is sinking America. Both parties are to blame. So vote out incumbents. Spare no one. We need new leadership, another Reagan or Truman. Congress better get the message: Cut that budget, or they’ll dump the rest of you in the coming Great Purge of 2012.

Unfortunately they’re tone deaf. Congress cannot see past the election. All that changes in November.

So thanks Tea Party, Vegas odds must favor a Second American Revolution. Actually, the revolution is already roaring, hot, it’s about time. The GOP and the Dems had more than a decade. But America’s worse off. We need a real revolution to restore sanity … or we can kiss democracy and capitalism good-bye, permanently.

Warning: Another revolution will cost investors 20% more losses

Yes, big warning, the Second American Revolution will extract painful austerity, not the “happy days are here again” future touted by tea-baggers. For years it’ll be impossible for most of America’s 95 million investors to develop a successful investment or logical retirement strategy.

Why? Political chaos will translate into extreme volatility and a highly unpredictable stock market. Result: Wall Street will lose another 20% of the value of your retirement portfolio in the next decade, just as Wall Street did the last decade. So if you think you’re “mad as hell” now, “you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”

Here’s the timeline:

Stage 1: The Dems just put the nail in their coffin by confirming they are wimps, refusing to force the GOP to filibuster the Bush tax cuts for America’s richest.

Stage 2: The GOP takes over the House, expanding its war to destroy Obama with its new policy of “complete gridlock,” even “shutting down government.”

Stage 3: Obama goes lame-duck.

Stage 4: The GOP wins back the White House and Senate in 2012. Health care returns to insurers. Free market financial deregulation returns.

Stage 5: Under the new president, Wall Street’s insatiable greed triggers the catastrophic third meltdown of the 21st century Shiller predicted, with defaults on dollar-denominated debt.

Stage 6: The Second American Revolution explodes into a brutal full-scale class war rebelling against the out-of-touch, out-of-control greedy conspiracy-of-the-rich now running America.

Stage 7: Domestic class warfare is compounded by Pentagon’s prediction that by 2020 “an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge” worldwide and “warfare is defining human life.”

What’s behind our 2010-2020 countdown? It became obvious after reading the brilliant but bleak “Decadence of Election 2010” report by Prof. Peter Morici, former chief economist at the International Trade Commission. He sees no hope from America’s political parties, just a dark scenario ahead.

Here are the 10 points we see in his message:

1. Expect nothing positive from Dems, the GOP or Tea Party

Yes, we’re all “justifiably ticked off.” But “Democrats, Republicans, and yes the Tea Party offer little that is encouraging.” Earlier Morici warned: “Democratic capitalism is in eclipse. … Politicians have deceived voters,” and are “suffering from delusions of grandeur, self deception and good old-fashioned abuse.”

2. Democracy has become too-big-to-govern … by anyone

“The current economic quagmire is a bipartisan creation.” Bush failures led to a “Great Recession … reckless Wall Street pay and fraud, a breakdown in sound lending standards by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac … Countrywide, and a huge trade deficit with China and on oil” leaving “Beijing and Middle East royals with trillions of U.S. dollars that they invested foolishly” in bonds “financing the housing and commercial real estate bubbles.”

3. Clinton, Bush, Obama policies all feeding revolutionary flames

Even before Bush, “all was set in motion by bank deregulation engineered by Clinton … Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers … Clinton’s deal to admit China into the World Trade Organization” handed “China free access to U.S. markets” while blocking exports. Earlier Dems blocked “domestic oil and gas development” and froze “auto mileage standards.” Obama “finally imposed higher mileage requirements,” but after pushing offshore drilling, he “punished the entire petroleum industry” for the BP disaster.

4. Bush’s biggest mistake: Goldman CEO Hank Paulson

Morici admits: If Bush is “culpable for anything, it was to not see the gathering storm on Wall Street.” Worse, his Treasury picks were disasters: [John] Snow was clueless, Paulson devious. He conned a clueless Congress into bailout trillions, “believing banks could borrow at 3% and lend at 5 and pay MBAs three years out of school five-million-dollar bonuses to create mortgage backed securities.” Greed drove the Bush Treasury.

5. All partisan political leaders are destined to sabotage America

One thing is clear to Morici: Not only were America’s leaders a “bunch of second-rate incompetents” on both the Clinton and Bush teams, “Obama’s ratcheting up government spending and taxes won’t fix what’s broke, and neither will the GOP prescription of tax cuts and deregulation.” Get it? Democracy is in a classic double-bind, no-win scenario.

6. America’s democratic capitalism trapped in systemic failure

Morici simply dismisses “Obama’s two signature initiatives — health-care reform and financial services reregulation.” They “simply don’t work.” Why? Politicians “failed to address the root problem, Americans pay 50% more for doctors, hospitals and drugs, than subscribers to national health plans in Germany, France and other decadent socialist European countries.” Yet, insurers hate reform, will self-destruct America first.

7. Wall Street’s insatiable greed is a virus that never sleeps

Wall Street banks are “back to their old tricks,” warns Morici, “hustling municipal governments into the kind of quick-fix budget schemes, like selling parking meters and airport fees.” Why? Wall Street’s “hustling shoddy corporate bonds that lack adequate collateral and may never be repaid” to justify their absurd mega-bonuses. And they’ll keep doing it till the revolution creates a new non-capitalist banking system.

8. New political leaders offer no hope — Wall Street rules America

GOP’s next leaders will fail: “Cutting taxes and mindless deregulation are not the answer.” We need the revenue. They have no real plan to trim “$1 trillion from federal spending … few believe deregulation will fix health care or Wall Street.” The GOP has no “effective government solutions to health care, Wall Street, fixing trade with China, and dependence on foreign oil.” And the Tea Party “only offers a purer form of failed Republicanism. Tax and spend less, and turn the country over to the robber barons.”

9. Praying for a messiah, we’re sleepwalking till the revolution

Morici’s solution: America “needs a prophet, another Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan.” But we’ll never get one, until a catastrophe hits. Wall Street’s so greedy, so corrupt, so untouchable, so much in control, they will bankroll and control all future “prophets.”

10. The Second American Revolution coming

Yes, extreme austerity: “Americans must accept fewer government-paid benefits — for the rich, the poor and those in between — and must acknowledge the market works best most of the time, but it is not working in health care, banking, China, and oil.” Huh? Sounds like classic economist’s double-speak: “The market works most of the time” … except the market doesn’t work at all in the four biggest economic sectors? Fuzzy thinking?

Morici warns, we need “new approaches to regulating, yes regulating, what the medical industry charges, bankers pay themselves, what Americans tolerate and buy” and “guiding big oil and car companies to sustainable solutions.”

Holy cow, he suddenly sounds more like a liberal politician than conservative economist. Yes, he’s reflecting the total chaos coming on the short road to the Second American Revolution.

In the end, however, you have to admit the good professor does make a lot of sense: “Sounds radical but running the world has never been a choice between statism and anarchy,” says Morici.

Choice? Unfortunately, he offers a false choice: Running America effectively means accepting “that the private sector is not the enemy and government is not evil, but neither can serve the other, and us, if value is not seen in each.”

Laudable, but impossible because once the GOP Tea Party of No-No is back in power, compromising is not on their agenda, “gridlock” is. So anarchy is the only choice — they will never, never work with Democrats … until forced by the Second America Revolution when the middle class finally rises up and overthrows the greedy wealth conspiracy of Wall Street, Washington, CEOs and the Forbes 400.

Till then, anarchy rules as the conspiracy keeps looting Treasury, stealing from taxpayers, conning us all.